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Jane Austen's ironic reference to 'the trash with which the press now groans' is only one of innumerable Romantic complaints about fiction's newly overwhelming presence. This book draws on evidence from over one hundred Romantic novels to explore the changes in publishing, reviewing, reading, and writing that accompanied the unprecedented growth in novel publication during the Romantic period. With particular focus on the infamous Minerva Press, the most prolific fiction-producer of the age, Hannah Hudson puts its popular authors in dialogue with writers such as Walter Scott, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, and William Godwin. Using paratextual materials including reviews, advertisements, and authorial prefaces, this book establishes the ubiquity of Romantic anxieties about literary 'excess', showing how beliefs about fictional overproduction created new literary hierarchies. Ultimately, Hudson argues that this so-called excess was a driving force in fictional experimentation and the advertising and publication practices that shaped the genre's reception. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
Hannah Doherty Hudson asserts that biography is an important, even ubiquitous element of eighteenth-century periodicals, and that it was largely a genre that excluded women because it tended to demand genius, curiosity, and public approbation—qualities difficult for a woman of any reputation to come by. And yet, there were important exceptions, often writers and actresses, which she explores in detail; periodical readers of both sexes were clearly interested in women’s biographies. Key to this argument are two case studies: of the women’s biographies featured by the European Magazine (1782–1826) in the post-Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798–1828) era, and of the magazine biographies of Elizabeth Inchbald. Ultimately, contends Hudson, magazine interludes with women’s biography helped re-shape the reception of the biographical genre writ large.
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